


sentimentality

by cateliot



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Death, F/M, First Mission, Gift, Philinda Secret Santa, dying, sentimentality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-21
Updated: 2016-12-21
Packaged: 2018-09-10 18:52:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8928985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cateliot/pseuds/cateliot
Summary: Coulson has always been sentimental. May has always been practical. In the face of death, both adjectives reveal the same truth.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [marvelleous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/marvelleous/gifts).



for @ **marvelelle** , who is wonderful and creative.

 

**_x_ **

 

Phil Coulson was a sentimental man.

He had grown up with a mother who loved to keep his trinkets, things he made during art class, old grades he got during high school.  Anything that reminded her of a good day, a beautiful moment, fleeting smiles.  She even had locks of hair from when he was a baby tucked into a picture frame in her room.

And that rubbed off on Phil.

When he moved away to follow Nick Fury to the S.H.I.E.L.D. academy, he had taken a box full of photographs and old trophies, a lifeline to his last identity.  He hid it from the rest of his classmates at the base of his bed.  

“I was surprised to see you at the -uh-  _home office_.”

He was surprised she wasn’t already on a strike team far away from any paperwork and suits of the Triskelion.  

The bar in Sausalito was loud and dingy.  Phil was a little worried about the germ contact they were getting from the bar seats.  They were supposed to be waiting for a contact in a navy jumper, but they had been there nearly an hour and making conversation with his new partner was a challenge.

“Melinda?”

She made a face before taking a tantalizing sip of alcohol.  She seemed oblivious to the leering male glances at her very short white dress that Fury had tossed at her earlier that morning.

“Don’t call me that.”

“You let Clint call you ‘Melinda’,” Coulson observed, taking a sip of vodka and allowing the liquid to burn the back of his throat.

Mel— _May_  just raised a perfectly shaped eyebrow.  

“Clint and I are friends.”

Coulson forced throat to shallow and his eyes to glance around for their target. Anything to distract him from tight fist currently attempting to crush his chest.

“So…what does that make us?”

May seemed mildly confused by this line of questioning, but her eyes were moving around the club, taking in every element of dingy bar.

“I don’t know—partners?  I have eyes on the package.”

“A group of dark clothed groups of men—four, entering in from the two o’clock. We need to wrap this up.”

May’s head tilt was the only indication that she heard him.  She rose up from her place at the bar giving Phil a spectacular glance right now her dress.  “I’ll be back, darling, I’m going to the ladies’ room.”

The girl in the hoodie seemed to watch Melinda and watched two minutes before following her into the back.

Three sips of beer and twelve minutes later, the girls hadn’t materialized from the backroom.  Phil felt his legs begin to twitch.  

Stay calm.  She’s Melinda May.  

She doesn’t need your help.

Eighteen minutes later, Phil knew something had gone wrong.  He threw a couple of bill down on their place at the bar and slipped into the crowd.  The pounding music made it hard for him to focus on the fear coursing through his veins.  

He paused outside the door of the women’s room for a moment–he could totally be arrested for this–before pushing the door open revealing an empty room. 

No Melinda.  No contact.  No disk drive.

 _Shit_.

They were screwed.

Desperate and out of options, Coulson stepped into the alley behind the club and dialed the only number on his phone.  His S.O. picked up on the second ring.  

“Done already?” Nick Fury’s voice was skeptical.

“Umm Sir?”

“What’s the problem, Coulson?”

“Err—I lost May, sir.”

“ _Lost her?_   She’s not some stray ass kitten you picked up off the side of the road, Coulson!  What do you mean  _lost her_?”

There was a rustle behind him and Phil turned to see one of the very large, very threatening men walking towards him.

_Abort the mission._

“Uh, yeah mom, sorry I think John must have taken the dog out before you got home.”

His words did nothing to stop the man’s walk towards.  He glanced around the edges of the dirty alley.  Brick.  One way.  Dirty. No exit.  

The only things that could even pass for a weapon would be the tiny pieces of bottle scattered on the ground and the crumpled-up napkins at his feet. Combatant death by napkin wouldn’t look great on his mission report.  

The man’s hand flew to the back of his shirt and a gun materialized from his waist band.  Phil dropped the phone to the ground and felt his hands spread to either side of his head. The gun pointed at him was threateningly close to his forehead.  Any thoughts of protocol, of his perfectly planned cover flew from his mind.

“Where’s the disk?”

Phil licked at his bottom lip, desperate for something—anything—to come out of his mouth.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The gun didn’t disappear from his face and the hand waving it just got angrier.

_Where the hell was May when he needed her?_

“Please—I’m telling you.  I have no idea what you’re talking about.  You have to believe me.”

“No—you believe me.  You’re going to tell me where it is.  Now.”

And give up May,  _hell no._

The gun came to press metallic, cold, and heavy between his eyes.

_Was this the end?_

Killed in action on his first mission:  Garrett would spend the weekend making fun of him to the other cadets in the bar.  His mother would be devastated.  It would take her years to bury him.  And May—oh God, Fury was going to kill May.  She was perfect at this job and he was going to get her screwed over by being the lame ass rookie who got shot in the forehead on his first mission.  

Was this what his father’s last moments were like before the drunk driver hit his car just outside their neighborhood on Christmas Eve?  

(Phil hoped not; if there was a God he prayed for mercy in those moments for his father instead of his terrible fear in the pit of his stomach.)

Between two out of control heartbeats, Phil felt his body twist into a perfectly arched roundhouse kick.  He had seen Melinda do it a thousand times in advanced combat.  He just didn’t realize that  _he_  was capable of such a move.

The gun hit the asphalt with a slap and he ran.  

It was against protocol.  He should have gone for the gun— _Melinda would have gone for the gun—_ but it was the only instinct left on his mind.

Three blocks over he crossed into an empty alley and collapsed against the bricked wall, exhausted, sweaty, terrified.  His hand came to clasp the chain at his neck and he pulled it out of his shirt.  The dirty and dinged wedding band was cold in his slick, shaking hand.  

_Where the hell was May?_

****

****

Decades later in his life, it was surprising then that when he was slumped up against a wall of a helicarrier that his first thoughts weren’t of the trading cards in his locker or the ring that belonged his father that was still around his neck.  They had nothing to do with a material in the base of his academy bunk or the photographs of him and Audrey in his apartment.  

None of those things held his home.  Not really.

“I’m clocking out here, Boss.”

He could feel the blood running down his shirt and could hear the drip, drip, drip of it onto the floor.  Loki was nowhere to be found and Nick’s hands on his shoulders were almost nothing next to the gaping pain in his chest.

“You’ll be the one to tell her?”

“I’m not telling her anything ‘cause you’re not dying.  You hear me, Coulson?”

It was hard to swallow and Phil focused on holding his S.O.’s attention.  

“P-promise me.  She can’t t-take another hit.”

Nick’s hands on his chest caused a wave of pain to hit him and tears stung his eyes.  Phil’s lips felt desperately dry and his arms and legs were beginning to feel strangely numb. He had watched Melinda flatline in Bahrain before the doctors revived her.  Was this what it felt like to die from blood loss?  Drip, drip, drip until nothing was left?

_Was this the end?_

Phil had thought that he was going to die numerous times in his career:  his first mission in Sausalito, once in the snow with Melinda when he thought we’d freeze before extraction found them, once in a shootout with Strike Team Delta in Berlin, later again in Brussels where he almost was elocuted to death before May and Natasha showed up to the party.

This was the first time he was partner-less.

“Sir, I need…to know that you’ll…”

Fury’s eyes were dark, but serious.

“I’ll look after her.”

There was no talk of which ‘her’ they were referring to.

 

**_x_ **

**_x_ **

 

Melinda May was a practical woman.

She grew up with a mother in intelligence and a father who couldn’t handle that commitment.  She knew the way the system worked: good men fall, good men suffer, and there’s nothing you can do about it other than to be better, faster, and smarter.  That’s the only way to stay alive.

Handcuffed to a boat in the middle of the bay with a gunshot to the shoulder made her wonder if she should have taken the job the CIA had offered her a year previous.

The water was cold and seeping and her flimsy white dress did nothing to combat the hypothermia she was no doubt contracting the fall temperatures.  She felt her body shaking under the waves that constantly lapped around her.

She knew it was the beginning of massive hypothermia and blood loss.  It had been hours–three maybe four–since she and her contact had made the trade off.  And while May had hidden the disk in a potted plant four streets over from the bar, their contact hadn’t been so lucky.

Melinda felt her fingers go numb and panic ran like cocaine in her veins.

_Was this the end?_

Her mother would be so disappointed and so would Peggy.  Dead on her first mission:  she knew better than to be so cocky.  She knew to check the docks before choosing them as a hiding place.  

And poor Coulson, her nervous classmate would make such a good agent, but Peggy would personally sink his career if he let her freeze to death in the bay on their first solo outing.

Melinda forced herself to keep shivering and jerked again at the handcuffs tying her to the boat.  She wasn’t going down without a fight.

She could barely see the docks or the two dead bodies (crossed off by broken necks) or wherever her partner had gone.  

“May?”

The breath she released was heavy and desperate.

“I’m here,” she called to him.

There was scuffling on the dock and it only took seconds for a frazzled, red-faced Coulson to appear.  His eyes were large as he took in her current scenario.

“Decided to come back for me?”

“Well I didn’t want to do all the paperwork on the case myself,” he quipped, shedding his outer layers before splashing into the water next to her.

“That kind of sentimentality will kill you someday, you know.”

Coulson gave her a dazzling smile.

“Your lips are blue.”

He did look quite concerned.  His blue eyes sweeping over her shaking form in the water. The white dress sticking to her equally white skin.  

“God, Melinda, you’re shot!”

The blood had stopped staining the water a half hour before.  Melinda was pretty sure it was only flesh wound.  

“Ww-hat did I ss-ay about that?” she snapped. Her teeth chattering took away some of the sting of her usual rhetoric.

Phil was still smiling as he wadded towards her. The tint in his eyes conveyed his anxiety despite the smile.  

“Yeah, yeah.  We’re not friends.  I’m going to put my arm around you now,  _partner_.”

Melinda smirked and soaked up the warmth Phil’s arms provided.  Perhaps having a partner wasn’t such a terrible thing after all.

 

Decades later in her life, it wasn’t surprising that when she realized she was going insane after being blasted by a ghost, that her first thoughts were of Natasha.  

It was out necessity.  Natasha was one of the only people in the world who could take her out.  Despite their shared history of combat, and Melinda really was an equally matched partner for the Russian assassin, she would take out Melinda if she asked.  

Natasha understood practicality like that.  

But if her first thoughts were of her friend, her last thoughts were of Phil.  

The darkness that surrounded her after Simmons’ voice faded was suffocating.  It was cold and heavy, just like the bay water.  And it frightened her.

She had flatlined before.  Once after a knife fight in Egypt with Clint and Fury.  The boss man had resuscitated her after three minutes of CPR in the sand.  The second in a tiny field hospital in Manama from blood loss.  She woke up from a coma ten days later back in D.C.  And she remembered both vividly.  

They were nothing like this.

“May?”

 _Coulson_.

“Melinda, I need you to come back.”

Phil’s image seemed to cut through the darkness around her, permeating through the black clinging to her.  If she hadn’t already recognized she was insane, Melinda would have thought she was crazy.

He looked like he always did.  Dorky, professional, and kind.  The tiny worry lines around his eyes seemed deeper as he met her gaze.

“May.  Take my hand.”

On instinct, May stepped back.  Fragments of images of a little girl in a flower shirt, the sound of Andrew’s voice over the phone, and the smell of scorching sand cut into her.  She felt her breathing go—ragged and out of control and the blackness seem to close in around her.    

_Was this the end?_

Perhaps she deserved a place in hell, destroyed by her own mind.  The blood in her ledger certainly saved her spot in the fire.

But Phil’s image was clear in front of her still and his hand cut through the sticky air of Bahrain to breach the space right in front of her.  

“Melinda, do you trust me?”

 _Yes_.

She extended her hand towards her partner.

 

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt: “is this the end?” during philinda secret santa. Follow me on tumblr @cateliot


End file.
